Recent polls showing President Obama’s approval ratings at normal levels and a partisan divide reasserting itself suggest that the political landscape was not as dramatically transformed last November as Democrats had hoped (AP photo).

Obama's poll numbers return to earth

A slew of recent polls showing President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings at essentially normal levels and a partisan divide reasserting itself suggest that the political landscape was not as dramatically transformed last November as Democrats had hoped.

The question now is whether those numbers will impede the president’s ability to achieve the transformative goals he set out for himself, particularly in the area of health care, where members of Congress crucial to his success may feel they have to respond to shifting public opinion.

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After months of showing sky-high job approval ratings, polls from major newspapers and from the Pew and Gallup organizations this week gave Obama the lowest numbers of his presidency. He is less popular than either George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush at this point in their presidencies, though more popular than Bill Clinton was after seven months in office.

Obama’s level of support now neatly matches the number of voters who elected him — with 52 percent of Americans approving of his job performance, while 42 percent disapprove, according to an average of major surveys. At the same time, Republicans are acting like Republicans again — nearly 80 percent of them disapprove of Obama’s performance — and disapproval among independent voters is growing steadily.

The country has also grown skeptical of his power to effect change: This week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a sharp drop, to 51 percent, in the share of Americans who say it’s “very” or “fairly” likely that Obama “will bring real change in direction to the country.”

“Expecting the politics of the country to transform around a new president is asking a bit much of the president and of the system,” said Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal, a Democratic pollster who noted that Americans who voted for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Obama’s 2008 Republican opponent, appear to have returned to the opposition. “As of the snapshot of the moment, things look about like they did last October,” he said. “If you’re a Democrat, you ought to be concerned with the trajectory.”

White House officials professed to be unsurprised that reality has reasserted itself. “The president always said to us that, at some point, we were going to hit the shoals of inertia,” said one White House aide. “That’s happening now.”

Other Democrats point out that while Obama’s job approval has declined, he remains personally popular, though the share of Americans who say he’s trustworthy also fell in the NBC/WSJ poll.

“The important thing is that even in pretty challenging times, he retains a lot of important redeeming qualities with voters, including his likability and the sense that he is smart and deals with problems honestly,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin.

A senior administration official compared Obama’s situation with that of Ronald Reagan when he was president. “It most tracks Reagan, in that you have personal attributes that are very high, and where people genuinely trust and like the president and want him to succeed, but the policies aren’t as popular,” he said. “The job approval was going to come down. We’re in the worst recession since FDR — you’re not going to have a great job approval. Personal attributes are still very high, and people trust him. They think he’s here for the right reasons. They think he wants to do the right thing.”